Red to the rescue!

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The world's most famous trouble-shooter received a rock-star welcome when he arrived in Australia to battle a gas blow-out, writes Damien Murphy.

Paul "Red" Adair was Australia's last American hero. Four decades after his brief rescue mission convinced many that American know-how could save the world, Adair remains a strange, heroic presence in the minds of older Australians and baby boomers.

Credited with stopping a disastrous gas leak that threatened the country's infant oil industry in 1968, his death at 89 at the weekend is also a reminder of a simpler time when one man could save the world - or at least the stock price of the then Big Australian, BHP, which was a joint venturer with Esso in the Bass Strait oil field.

On December 2, 1968, a serious gas blow-out occurred while production wells were being drilled in Bass Strait's Marlin Field, about 100 kilometres off the Victorian coast.

Despite attempts by drillers to cap the blow-out, within the hour mud started to break through the bottom and the sea soon was broiling. Esso-BHP engineers feared the gas would ignite, sending a fireball sweeping through the oil rig. Such a fire at sea would be unprecedented.

Most of the crew on the Marlin rig filed down the platform stairs to inflatable rafts waiting in the water, but two Esso drilling supervisors and a radio operator remained on board to assess the situation. They called in a helicopter and abandoned the rig.

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At the time the Bass Strait oil and gas discoveries were only a few years old. Gas had been found in early 1965 and in March the following year Esso-BHP struck oil in the Marlin field, with the Bass Strait yielding 300,000 barrels a day.

Esso-BHP engineers at Sale in East Gippsland radioed the company's Melbourne headquarters and it was quickly decided the blow-out needed the skills of the legendary Texan oilwell firefighter "Red" Adair. He arrived from Houston within 48 hours.

He was the first American to come to Australia's help since General Douglas MacArthur fled the Philippines in 1942 to become Supreme Commander, South-West Pacific Area.

In the years since MacArthur's arrival Australia had been turning from Britain. In 1964 Australia joined the US in fighting the Vietnam War. Demonstrations against the conflict were still rare in 1967 when US president Lyndon Johnson flew to Melbourne to attend the memorial ceremony of the missing prime minister, Harold Holt, a visit which further cemented relationships between the two countries.

A year later Johnson's fellow Texan, Adair, as odd as it may seem, already had an Australian presence: John Wayne's 1968 movie Hellfighters, was based loosely on the exploits of Adair and followed the adventures of an oilwell firefighter, Chance Buckman, as he battled blazes around the world while coping with his ex-wife (Vera Miles) and daughter (Katherine Ross). It was a hit in Australian drive-ins.

With Adair coming to the rescue, John Sorell, then a gun reporter with the now defunct Melbourne Herald newspaper, was dispatched to Fiji to get an exclusive. Now 67 and honeymooning in Sri Lanka, Sorell recalls one of his biggest beats.

"I was in a plane taxing down the runway at the old Essendon Airport in Melbourne when they came out and shoved my passport on a pair of tong things through the pilot's window," he says. "When I finally got on Adair's plane in Fiji - an old PanAm Stratocruiser - I sent a note up to him via the purser and he called me up front and just started talking. He was brim-full of quotes, a great PR man, a reporter's dream, patiently explaining in this southern drawl how he was going to fix our 'little problem' as he put it."

Sorell won the 1969 Walkley Award for his Adair interview.

When Adair arrived in Australia he was accorded the sort of welcome that was to be later extended to rock stars and supermodels.

But he already had the look: "Only [168 centimetres] but larger than life with slicked-back, flaming red hair, alligator-skin cowboy boots," one newspaper reported. Australia had never seen anything like him.

Reports had him being paid $500,000 to $1 million for the Bass Strait job, Monopoly money for the time. And when he hit the sleepy fishing village of Sale in East Gippsland he set the place on fire, moving into the Warwick Hotel with a 30-strong entourage that is remembered as much for their conversion to Victoria Bitter and the raucous times that accompanied the rescue mission.

"Well, they seemed to party a lot," said Bruce Arnup, a Sale antique dealer, who was a young Esso engineer at the time. "The whole place was just swept up by Adair.

"On one hand there was a disaster at sea, and yet these blokes seem to be very calm and went about their business and drinking without any hint of being flustered. He just threw untold money at any problem and it seemed fine with everybody."

The gas blow-out produced one of the biggest logistic operations that had been mounted in Australia.

Esso-BHP engineers decided to convert a huge barge which was laying a pipeline to the Marlin platform into a gigantic mud-pumping unit. It was towed to the Barry Beach terminal near Wilsons Promontory and work began on four tanks to make them hold 80,000 litres of mud. Unseasonable rough summer weather hampered operations; high winds lashing the barge made it necessary to tow it to Lakes Entrance for a crew change.

On Christmas Day crew leaves were cancelled but strong winds again whipped up four-metre swells. The weather finally cleared on New Year's Eve. At 8pm the pumps were started and about midnight the Marlin 7 blowout was sealed when Esso-BHP engineer Bob Giffen threw the switch.

Boz Student, a drilling engineer on a neighbouring rig, says the Marlin rescue operation was a joint effort but Adair's team had the sharp end of the job, going through the bubbling sea and climbing on board the gas engulfed rig to get the machinery in place. "That's not easy work. The technology and the experience didn't exist in Australia at the time," he says.

The job over, Adair pulled out of town, pausing only for a night or two in Melbourne. There, he picked up his cheque from BHP's Bourke Street headquarters and went to dinner at the then swish Southern Cross Hotel - only to be informed by the maitre d' he could not dine in an open-necked shirt. The hero of the hour disappeared into a nearby men's lavatory, borrowed a friend's shoelace and emerged to tell the man he was dressed Texas-style, in a string tie.

Once back home there was a more grand Texan gesture towards Australia. Adair sent the then prime minister, John Gorton, a certificate making the Australian nation a member of the Royal Order of Fire-eaters.

"This is to certify that the wonderful people of Australia is now a member in good standing and has been heated-treated and oil-squinche," read the citation. Few had any idea what he was talking about but were happy enough knowing "Red" Adair had remembered.

Adair, already a pioneer in fighting oil disasters when he arrived in Australia, went onto bigger disasters and greater fame in the North Sea and the Middle East.

Yesterday one of his rivals, Bob Sawyer, president of the US-based company Red Flame, told the ABC Adair had blazed a trail that allowed him to have a monopoly for some years on the trade of fighting oil fires.

"Red was a very flamboyant firefighter," Sawyer said. "Red was one of those persons who when he went to a job everybody knew he was there."